Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  32

  Breaking and Entering

  Ainsley seemed weirdly giddy at the two of them heading over to Frankie’s office together to break in and steal evidence. “You know that what we’re doing is really kind of illegal and not really right,” Lily pointed out.

  “Whatever” was her sister’s cheerful reply. “We’re spending time together. Why didn’t you tell me you were trying to find out what happened to Dad?”

  “Because, as you’ve seen, this is a very sensitive situation.”

  “I bet you told your girlfriend, though,” Ainsley retorted, though her tone was more wistful than resentful.

  Lil sighed. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I just had to be careful, Ainsley.” She looked out at her headlights piercing through the night, illuminating the yellow lines on the road. “Speaking of not telling me things…” She banged a fist on the steering wheel. “What the hell, Ainsley? Why didn’t you tell me Aunt Caroline was involved in your crazy biker thing?”

  “Involved?” Ainsley laughed. “She’s been running the show for months.”

  “Well, okay, fine. So what the hell? What’s the deal?”

  “The night we got picked up in Sunset Park, Mom got my message, and she called Aunt Caroline to see if she could get me out of trouble and just kind of make the whole thing go away.”

  Ainsley sighed. “Aunt Caroline got her message, but instead of calling Mom and telling her she was bailing me out, she just came down and did it. She got all four of us out: me, Khady, Nadia, and Vea. She did make the whole thing go away, as you probably figured out. But instead of just letting that be that, she decided to, um, channel our violent tendencies into something more useful, was what she said. I think it was like, she saw us as an opportunity to right wrongs. I guess being married to Uncle John, she saw a lot of bad guys walk, a lot of guilty people get away on technicalities and stuff like that, and… Maybe she just saw it as a way to put some things right.”

  Lily sighed. “Aunt Caroline is seriously unstable, you know that, right?”

  Ainsley snorted. “Obviously. But you know. Where was my life going, Lil? Where has my life ever been going? I’m good at fighting. Not much else.”

  A silence fell between them. Lily noticed after a moment that she had stopped breathing. Ainsley’s breaths, meanwhile, seemed annoyingly loud and heavy. Pinpricks of rain started appearing on the windshield. Lily suddenly felt ashamed that she hadn’t tried to do more to be there for her sister, although at the moment, she wasn’t even sure what that should have been.

  “Mom’s getting a little more out of her shell lately, but she’s been kind of out to lunch for the last few years. And you haven’t…you know, been around. I woulda been lost without Quin,” she said quietly.

  Lily’s eyes suddenly went wide. “Shit! Quin. I never called him back!” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and tossed it to Ainsley. “Here, can you just send him a text and let him know I’m okay?”

  Ainsley did. Quin texted back: Thank god. Plz call me as soon as you can.

  The breaking and entering went reasonably well, though Lily couldn’t help cringing at how expertly Ainsley located a cinder block and tossed it through the back window. Nevertheless, she quickly found the stuff she was looking for.

  “So what now?” Ainsley asked, continuing to rifle through the desk drawers despite Lily having announced that she had what she needed.

  “Hey, knock it off!” Lily complained, shoving Ainsley’s shoulder.

  “What? They’re mobsters. It’s all ill-gotten gains, man.” She found a pair of expensive looking Armani shades and popped them on. “Whaddya think?”

  “I don’t care how ill-gotten they are. Please, no burglary. Let’s go.”

  Ainsley huffed and put the shades down.

  As they walked out to the car, Ainsley’s phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket. It was Khady.

  Khady and Vea stuck close to each other. Both were looking warily at Caroline, who looked about as unhinged as either of them had ever seen her. Clearly she had some kind of history with this guy, and it was making an already sketchy situation that much worse.

  Khady never questioned whether their actions had been righteous, not in all the time they’d been taking direction from Caroline. This guy obviously had tried to kill Lily, so surely he needed to pay for that, but with very few exceptions, all of Phaedra’s victims had already been through the justice system and seen it fail to do its job.

  Caroline was pacing around the clubhouse, Frankie’s gun in the waistband of her jeans. She’d march up to him, look at him with withering contempt, stalk away, repeat.

  Khady pulled out her phone and texted Vea: I’m worried

  Vea texted back a few minutes later: Yeah she don’t look right

  Second after uneasy second ticked by. After what seemed like half an hour, Caroline sat in the chair Lily had been using, looked intently at Frankie for a few moments, and announced, “We’ve gotta wax him.”

  “Are you joking?” Khady exclaimed.

  “Not really,” Caroline answered with an eerie calm. “If we let him walk, he’s just gonna send some of his dago goon buddies after my niece. She got his confession. She’s getting his ledgers. She doesn’t need him.”

  “Now hold on, stoosh,” Vea protested. “When we signed up with you, we didn’t agree to no killing.”

  “It’s necessary,” Caroline insisted, her eyes locked on his face. Her dispassion was unsettling. “He’s a two-bit mobster. Nobody’s going to blink when he turns up in the East River.”

  The silence that followed was agonizing.

  “That’s not really Vea’s point,” Khady finally said.

  Frankie stirred in his chair. “Caroline,” he rasped under his breath, his eyes not quite open.

  Caroline gave him a frosty look. “Frankie.”

  “Caroline, I didn’t—”

  She put a hand on his lips and shushed him. “Sssh, Frankie. You stomped on my heart, honey. And then the next time I see you, you’re trying to kill my niece. This upsets me, you understand?”

  “Come on, Carrie,” he wheedled with a little smirk, trying to peer at her through his swelling eye. “Come on, it didn’t work out so bad for ya, did it? You married that fancy judge; you got a kid. Not so bad, right?”

  Caroline laughed. “Like that changes what you did.”

  “Come on, Carrie,” he whispered, trying to turn on whatever charm he possessed. “Come on, we had some nice times. It didn’t work out, but we had some nice times, right? Coney Island, that night under the boardwalk?”

  Caroline’s face twisted in agonized rage. “Coney Island,” she spat, and paced away from him. “Yeah, it was great. Too bad it didn’t mean anything to you.” Her hands were fidgeting with the gun now.

  Khady and Vea gave each other a look and started to inch closer to her.

  “Carrie, I never said that—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “You made a play for my married sister!” she shouted at him. “I should shoot you on principle, just for that!”

  His eyes were darting between Caroline, the gun, and the two girls who were moving nearer to her. “Caroline, we were kids back then. It was the eighties, for Chrissakes…”

  “You phony-ass, fake-guinea, goon piece of shit!” She leveled the gun at him, and it looked like she’d at the very least fired one before. Khady could see the whites of Frankie’s one eye that wasn’t swelling up. “You tried to kill my niece. You helped those people cover up my brother-in-law’s murder. You think I don’t know how shit plays out with you mobster jackoffs? You learn a few things being married to a judge, let me tell you. I let you leave here alive, and it comes back tenfold at my niece. The odds you land in my lap, out of all the people you could have run into… It can’t be coincidence. No way, Frankie. Sorry, honey.”

  There was a short, sharp, high-pitched whine as she squeezed the trigger.

  Vea and Khady lunged at her.

  Frankie slumped d
own in his chair.

  Ainsley picked up the phone.

  “What’s going on?” Her voice was tense.

  “We got a problem,” Vea’s voice came through the phone.

  Ainsley frowned. “Talk to me.”

  “Empress shot the guy.”

  Ainsley cursed under her breath. “She shot him,” Ainsley told Lily.

  “Christ,” Lily sighed. “Put her on speaker.” Ainsley did. “Vea, where is she now?” Lily called out.

  “Well, me and Khady jumped her,” Vea’s voice came thin through the phone. “We tried to stop her before she done it, but… Anyway, she’s coolin’ out in a chair now in the back room. We tied her up.”

  “Okay…and what about him? Is he dead? Where’s he shot?”

  “Well, she was aiming dead center in the chest, but we jumped her, so…looks like he took it in the ribs,” came Khady’s voice. “Left side, kinda low. Might or might not have hit a lung or something, so… He’s not dead, but it’s not good. He’s bleeding a lot. We have to decide pretty fast what we’re gonna do with him, though. If we call an ambulance now, he might be salvageable.” An awkward pause. “Assuming that’s what we want to do.”

  Lily shook her head, running through an array of curses. “I don’t think he’s any good to me dead.”

  “Okay, but…then what about Empress?” came Vea’s voice after a moment. “I mean, we gonna spring her, we gonna leave her here for the cops to find? What about all that?”

  Lily sighed, running through a hundred scenarios in her head.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m just trying to work out what we do here.” She hesitated a moment more, then said, “Okay. Uncuff him. He’s shot in the chest, he’s not going anywhere. Is she awake?”

  “No, we knocked her out.”

  “We still need him alive. The building is rented under Caroline’s name, I’m assuming, so it’s not like we can play stupid there. And if they come for a gunshot wound, you damn well better believe they’re going to send a squad car. So this is what you do: You call 911, okay? I noticed an old pay phone bank at the corner when I was driving up. Call them from there; do not ID yourself. You tell them you need a squad car and an ambulance. You tell them you heard shots, not sure how many, and you’re very concerned.”

  There was a silence as they thought the plan over.

  Lily plunged on: “Then you move Caroline, in her chair, out into the same room with him. Wait until you hear the sirens getting close. Then and only then, you untie her, and you guys slip out the back.”

  Nobody had a better idea, so Vea finally agreed, “Solid plan, Babylon. We gonna meet you later or what?”

  “For now, just go hang out somewhere. We’ll call you in a little bit. I’ve gotta figure out what the next move is.”

  They hung up the phone. Ainsley was looking at her sister as if she was a stranger. A stranger she was impressed with, but also slightly afraid of. “You really gonna hang Aunt Caroline out to dry like this?”

  Lily shrugged. “She just shot a witness that we need. And she’s essentially been running a gang for the last what, nine months?”

  Ainsley was uncomfortable though, and persisted. “But what about the rest of us? We all participated in a gang. Shouldn’t you be locking us up, too?”

  She sighed. “Ainsley, look, you’re young, and you screwed up getting involved with that. Aunt Caroline knows better. I understand why you thought what you were doing was right, but this isn’t even like that. She didn’t shoot him for my sake. She shot him because of a personal beef with him.”

  Conflict was written across Ainsley’s face.

  “And,” Lily added, “she’s pretty well-connected. She knows so many judges, so many lawyers. I mean, she made your B&E and vandalism arrest not just go away, but like...away, away. You were picked up, but you were never even booked, did you realize that?”

  Ainsley shook her head. After an awkward pause, she asked, “So, what now?”

  “Well,” Lily mused, “I have evidence of the cover-up. What I don’t have is evidence of who did it and why, apart from Quin’s phone call and whatever Erik said to him.” It was time to look at the part of the files that she’d put off till now. She hadn’t felt ready to look at the crime scene photos of her father’s body. She just hoped it would put everything into focus because she was running out of time. “Once Frankie shows up in the hospital, pretty much all hell is going to break loose. I’m probably going to have to be ready to make some arrests, so I damn well better have evidence for why I’m doing it.”

  Lily’s phone rang. It was Miri. She picked up.

  “Baby, are you okay? What’s going on?”

  Miri’s voice sounded exhausted, smaller than she was used to hearing it. “Lil, listen, don’t hang up. I have someone here who wants to talk to you. Just listen to him, okay?”

  There was a momentary silence, and then a man’s voice came through the phone, sounding nearly as tired as Miri’s. “Detective Sparr?”

  “Yes?” Her stomach tightened.

  “This is Commissioner Connolly. I think you and I need to talk.”

  “Yeah, I already had a talk this evening with a guy who tried to wrap a garrote wire around my throat. Can you imagine my reluctance?”

  A long, uncomfortable pause. “Listen, that wasn’t my doing. But things look rather bad for you, you know? You’ve got a partner in the hospital, you’ve disappeared with a suspect, and—”

  “And I’ve also got Frankie Beanbags’s ledgers that show how much money you’ve gotten from the Corratos over the last decade. So, things don’t really look so great for you either, at the moment.”

  “So then, what’s your plan?” he challenged. “Come and arrest me?”

  “Not exactly, sir.”

  His voice became gentle, weary, the way her father’s did when she was getting into a lot of trouble. “Detective, I don’t know what you did to Frankie to get those ledgers, and I don’t want to know, at least not right now. But this isn’t leading you anywhere good. You’re Graham Sparr’s daughter; I know that means you’d rather do things right if you can help it. Don’t you want to know what really happened to your father that night? So you can decide for yourself what the right thing is, now?”

  Lily paused. “And are you going to tell me that?”

  “I’m going to show you. Meet me at Midtown South, and we’ll open up the evidence.”

  “All right,” Lily replied. “I can be there in thirty minutes. But I’m leaving the ledgers, the testimony, and everything else I’ve got with someone, and if I don’t check in with them, the whole lot of it is going public.”

  Connolly grunted in assent. “Fair enough.”

  They hung up.

  She turned back to Ainsley and handed her the stack of folders and a couple of bills out of her purse. “I need you to guard this stuff with your life. There’s some cab money if you want to go back to the warehouse or meet up with Khady and Vea. Call me in forty-five minutes. If I don’t pick up…” She paused, realizing that she wasn’t sure what to do if that happened.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out the matchbook that had Maggie’s number scribbled on it. “If I don’t answer, call her.” She drove away.

  Ainsley called a car service. Ten minutes, they said. She strolled back to the rear of the building where they’d broken in and slipped back inside. She found the shades and popped them on again. Much better.

  33

  Locker 338G

  Lily found Miri’s siren and popped it onto the roof. She’d told Connolly half an hour, but being able to cut through the traffic meant she was able to more or less speed there, and she made the trip in about twenty minutes.

  She got to her desk and took out the case folder. She took a breath, then flipped to the crime scene photos in the back. She wanted a moment with them before dealing with Connolly.

  After her stomach had settled down a little, she took it in, the way she was always good at doi
ng. There was little blood. That shouldn’t have been surprising, since they’d decided the cause of death as a brain aneurysm due to blunt force trauma to the head. She let her eyes settle on the image, absorb the way he was lying, the car door hanging open, the broken bottle of Courvoisier with the red bow still on it, the coat crumpled beside him on the pavement.

  The coat.

  That wasn’t his coat.

  At least, if it was his coat, it wasn’t one she recognized. Her father had had very simple, elegant tastes in clothing; the winter usually found him in his favorite overcoat, a charcoal grey Chesterfield with clean lines, a velvet collar, and a single back vent. It was hard to tell in the picture, but this looked more like a tweed hunting coat—light grey-brown, with dark, notched lapels—and she could see one of the sleeves had some embellishment stitching on the cuffs. A very nice coat. Not his style, though.

  “Ready, Detective?” came a voice from behind her.

  Lily jumped, then looked over her shoulder and found Commissioner Connolly looking down at her. His expression read as deeply exhausted, but also something else. Impressed? Amused? She wasn’t sure.

  “That’s not his coat,” she declared with unwavering certainty.

  “You’re right,” he agreed.

  “The video showing my dad leaving at 9:14 that night is wrong. It wasn’t him. It was Erik, wearing his coat.”

  He nodded again.

  She looked at the picture once more. “So, it was just what, dumb bad luck that he happened to have parked in a spot that the cameras didn’t reach?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, why? Why would Erik Schulze dirty his hands like that?”

  Corey shook his head. “Erik Schulze isn’t exactly who you think he is. This wasn’t the way things were meant to end up.”

  Lily looked dubious. “So what was he doing there?”

  Corey sighed. “He went there to try and reason with your dad. About the Lyonsbank stories. He was concerned that his father would choose a less savory route to deal with him than the legal one.”